


To Steal A Kiss

by sheliesshattered (glasscannon)



Series: For As Long As We Get [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s08e05 Time Heist, F/M, First Kiss, Kissing, Memory Loss, Missing Scene, Mutual Pining, POV Twelfth Doctor, Snogging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23938747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscannon/pseuds/sheliesshattered
Summary: “What if two people were about to have their memories wiped anyway? What if they’d both already consented to having the last several hours stricken from the record? Then it wouldn’t be so much abusing the memory worms as making the most out of the opportunity at hand.”“The opportunity to do what?” the Doctor asked, glancing down at her.Clara met his gaze, brown eyes wide and earnest and utterly focused on him, and he realised his mistake with barely a fraction of a second to spare.“This,” she said, grasping his lapels and pressing her mouth to his.His brain shorted out.Time Heistmissing scene, canon compliant. Can be read as a stand-alone, or as a prequel toThe Impossible Soldier.
Relationships: Clara Oswin Oswald/Danny Pink (implied), Twelfth Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald
Series: For As Long As We Get [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1642132
Comments: 38
Kudos: 117





	To Steal A Kiss

“Alright, so,” Clara started as she entered the console room, ridiculous stilt-shoes clacking against the metal grating. “All four of the briefcases are in place: The first one with your ‘Architect’ recording, the bank schematic, the decoy DNA for Saibra, and the recordings of us each consenting to the memory wipe. The second case with the dimensional shift bomb, the third one with the teleporters cleverly disguised as shredders, and the fourth one with the info Psi needs to hack the lock codes on the vault door. Psi and Saibra are ready and waiting for us to join them at the jump-off point, just as soon as we can stash the TARDIS and get back down there. What else do we need to do?” she asked.

“Pack up the memory worms for transport. And you still need to change your shoes,” the Doctor replied brusquely, not looking up from the console and the complex navigational route he was pre-programming into it. Using the TARDIS to get them in and out of the main portion of the bank was easy. Remote flying the TARDIS back to the escape ship in orbit just as the solar storm was picking up, less so.

“I like these heels,” she said, shrugging.

“Clara, the chances that we’re going to end up running for our lives at some point before the end of the day are non-zero. I don’t want to spend the next several hours listening to you complain that _I_ didn’t give you a chance to change out of your impractical footwear, because you will have forgotten that I have, in fact, told you several times to go change.”

“Oh, hush. I just grabbed another pair of shoes from the wardrobe room, see?” she said, holding the shoes up for his inspection. “Perfect for running. I’ll change before we touch the gross worm things.” She made a face. “Do I really have to touch them?”

The Doctor sighed loudly. “ _Yes_ , for the fifth time, you really have to touch the memory worms. We can’t walk into the bank knowing what we know now, or none of this will work. So either touch the worm or go home, your choice.”

“Do you really think I’d let you rob an impenetrable bank _without_ me?” she scoffed. “I’ll touch the damn worm.”

“Good,” he said shortly. He had no intention of pulling this heist without her, but he also had no intention of letting _Clara_ know that. If she went home now, it would be straight into the arms of date-guy, and that was simply— unacceptable. For reasons he didn’t care to think about.

“You’re _sure_ the worms will work?” Clara asked. “I’d hate to run up against bank security only to find that the memory wipe wasn’t quite as complete as we thought.”

“They’ll work,” he replied, most of his attention still caught up in double-checking the TARDIS’s flight plan. “I’ve used them before.”

“Bit of a catch-22 though, isn’t it? How would you even _know_ that you used the worms to wipe your memory, without a memory of using the worms?”

He shot her a quick glance. “I’ve used them on other people, too.” He’d tried to use a memory worm on one of her echoes, even, not that it was worth bringing up just now.

Clara raised her eyebrows, mouth quirking. “ _Really_ , Doctor? Well, that has some... interesting implications.”

Her tone had gone all funny. “Interesting how?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know.

“If you can make someone forget something that’s happened, I mean. You could get away with all sorts of... _interesting_ things. Besides bank heists, I mean.”

He sputtered at her as her implication sank in. “Clara, I have _never_ — The consent recordings weren’t just for show, I take this very seriously! Memory worms shouldn’t be abused. They aren’t a get-out-of-jail-free card, or an excuse to lose all inhibitions! Memory wipes have to be undertaken with precision and care!”

“Hmm,” she said, her tone still too playful for his taste. She circled around the console and came to stand beside him. Too close beside him. Within what he privately termed as ‘the hugging radius’. She did this when she was preparing to attack him with a hug, infiltrated his personal space and waited to see if he would flinch. “But what if...”

“ _Clara_ ,” he admonished, not making eye contact but not stepping away from her, either. The trouble, of course, was that he _liked_ having her this close, no matter how many times he tried to convince her otherwise. His last face had treated it too lightly, this sort of casual intimacy with her. But the last thing he felt towards Clara now was _casual_ , and he craved her nearness in a way he knew meant he absolutely, unquestionably could not allow himself to have it. Especially when she so clearly didn’t feel the same way about him.

“What if,” she went on as though he hadn’t spoken, “what if two people were about to have their memories wiped anyway? What if they’d both already consented to having the last several hours stricken from the record? Then it wouldn’t be so much abusing the memory worms as making the most out of the opportunity at hand.”

“The opportunity to do what?” he asked, glancing down at her.

She met his gaze, brown eyes wide and earnest and utterly focused on him, and he realised his mistake with barely a fraction of a second to spare.

“This,” she said, grasping his lapels and pressing her mouth to his.

His brain shorted out.

It was too much — too much stimulus, too much feedback, too many emotions, too many nerve endings firing all at once, and all of it a blur of _Clara Clara Clara_. That same barmaid-slash-governess Clara-echo had kissed him once, almost a thousand years ago. It had been just as startling and yet nothing, _nothing_ like this, nothing like his Clara pinning him against the TARDIS console and kissing him like she meant it, like she loved him the way he loved her.

Clara moved her lips against his, and some sort of muscle memory or instinct kicked in and his body remembered what to do, and suddenly he was kissing her back. His hands found their way to her jaw, fingers weaving through her hair as he pulled her closer. She hummed a little noise, surprised and happy, and opened her mouth under his. Taking it as encouragement, he tilted his head, deepening the kiss, hyperfocused on the way every inch of Clara seemed to be pressed against him.

Pressed against him because _Clara Oswald was kissing him_. Not an echo, not a dream, not some never-could-be fantasy he’d spun up to while away the years on Trenzalore. Clara. His Clara. Kissing him.

She pulled back all too soon, and he released her, mind reeling, only to find that she’d barely moved a few inches away — for breath, he realised. Because humans didn’t have respiratory bypass or binary cardiovascular systems. She stared up at him, face flushed and eyes bright, and didn’t relinquish her hold on his lapels.

“You’re better at this than I thought you would be,” she told him, chest brushing his with each intake of breath.

“You’ve thought about this?” the Doctor blurted out. His speech centre was evidently on auto-pilot.

“Frequently,” she confirmed, gaze drifting to his mouth, “for far, far too long now.”

Oh. “You thought about Bowtie, you mean.”

Her eyes darted up to his again. “I thought about _you_. Think about you. Present tense.”

“What about date-guy?” He really had to get this auto-speech problem under control. Date-guy was the last thing he wanted to be thinking about just now.

“What about him?” Clara demanded. “He’ll never know about this. In a few minutes, you and I will have forgotten it, too. No harm done.” 

“But—”

“I don’t want to talk about date-guy,” she said, interrupting him. “He isn’t here. He isn’t _you_.” 

And then she was kissing him again, and that seemed to be a suitable off switch for the auto-speech issue. Her hands left his lapels, finding their way up his shoulders and to the short hair over his collar, and his knees quite nearly buckled. He pulled her closer in response, slipping his hands under her suit jacket to the small of her back. She was so _warm_. Warm and real and _here_ , his Clara. Clara Clara Clara. Kissing him like she wanted to be with _him_ and not date-guy—

Abruptly reality came crashing back down around him, and he pulled away from her so quickly that she stumbled slightly in her silly, sexy stilt-shoes, and had to catch herself on the edge of the console.

“What—?” she started, breathless.

“We can’t do this,” he said, taking another step away from her. “This, you and me, we can’t.”

“Why not? Seemed pretty damn good from my end.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then what is?” Clara was staring up at him with wide eyes, confusion bordering on hurt, and his ancient traitorous hearts cracked a bit more. He loved her, _he loved her_ , and for her this was just— 

“It doesn’t mean the same for you as it does for me,” he said, letting the words fall out of him to land heavily in the silence of the console room.

Her expression shuttered and she dropped her gaze, took a moment to compose herself. “But we won’t remember any of this,” she said reasonably, voice level. “In a few minutes, we’ll go join Psi and Saibra, and touch the memory worms, and forget everything that happened after Karabraxos phoned.”

“And that’s the key to all this for you, isn’t it?” he demanded. “You _want_ to forget that we did this. That _you_ did this. You wanted to have this without dealing with any of the consequences.”

“You’re saying you didn’t, Doctor? That you _didn’t_ want this? Because it felt like extremely enthusiastic consent to me!”

“No. The difference, Clara, is that I would keep this memory if I could. But we don’t have that choice. We have a job to do, a near-extinct race to save, and that hinges on _forgetting_ everything that’s happened in the last few hours. Including this.”

She glared at him, momentarily speechless. “You would never have even let this happen if we weren’t about to forget it!” she snapped.

“Neither would you!” he shot back. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head and turning away before she could object again. “You stole your kiss, you had your fun. Now we have work to do.”

“Doctor—” 

“ _No_. We have to go,” he told her firmly, not meeting her gaze. “We have to rob the bank, and save the Teller, and get Psi and Saibra the cures we promised them. No more dilly-dallying. And for god’s sake, change your shoes.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments mean the world to me! If the angst is too much to bear, please do continue on to the next part in the series, _The Impossible Soldier_. ❤️


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